Up to 1,600 jobs are at risk at Burger King with the chain warning some restaurants may not survive the pandemic (Picture: Getty)
Burger King UK’s boss has warned that up to 1,600 jobs could be lost as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Only about 370 of the restaurant chain’s 530 UK stores have reopened since the nation went into lockdown.
Chief executive Alasdair Murdoch told the BBC’s Newscast the economic damage stemming from the crisis could ultimately force the company to permanently close up to 10% of its stores.
He said: ‘We don’t want to lose any (jobs). We try very hard not to, but one’s got to assume somewhere between 5% and 10% of the restaurants might not be able to survive.
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‘It’s not just us – I think this applies to everyone out there in our industry.’
Chancellor Rishi Sunak on Wednesday unveiled a £30 billion support package to help boost the nation’s economic recovery, which included plans to subsidise restaurant bills throughout August to encourage people to dine out.
But Mr Murdoch said that Government schemes ‘do not do enough’ to compensate restaurants for the combination of fixed costs and lost sales throughout the pandemic.
He said: ‘I don’t think you can ever get over the top of this problem.’
Mr Sunak has urged people to dine out and embrace post-lockdown freedoms as he warned that jobs are at risk if economic activity does not return to normal.
He said he was ‘anxious’ about the state of the UK’s economy which is ‘entering into a very significant recession’ because of the coronavirus crisis but that he is hoping to ‘safely reopen’ more of the country in order to kickstart the economy.
He told Sky News today: ‘We have to rediscover behaviours that we’ve essentially unlearned over the last few months.
‘But unless activity returns to normal, those jobs are at risk of going which is why we acted in the way that we did.’
A WOMAN has died and the race is on to find any survivors after a 65-foot crane collapsed on top of two houses and a block of flats in East London this afternoon.
At least four others are injured and an 80-year-old woman is believed to be trapped in the wreckage of her home after the shocking incident, which happened in Gale Street, Bow, at around 2.30pm.
The crane fell on a block of flats before hitting a row of terraced housesCredit: Getty Images - Getty
The crane collapsed onto block of flats before hitting two homesCredit: Jamie Lorriman
Two people suffered head injuries and another two were treated at the sceneCredit: PA:Press Association
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Fire crews, police and paramedics are at the sceneCredit: Getty Images - Getty
Pictures from the scene show the destruction caused by the crane, as well as firefighters and search-and-rescue teams combing through the wrecked homes.
Officials said two people were rushed to hospital with head injuries and another two were treated at the scene.
A huge search was launched for a person missing in the rubble of the destroyed properties.
And this evening, emergency response teams have confirmed that a female casualty has died in the tragedy.
London Fire Brigade said a woman had been found on the first floor of one of the houses.
Assistant commissioner Graham Ellis said: "Sadly, one woman died at the scene."
It's believe an 80-year-old woman is also trapped.
Hero neighbours rushed to save those stuck in the destroyed properties after the horrific incident.
One witness said she saw a "shivering and shaking" woman being led to safety after she was rescued from the second floor by firefighters who had scaled up ladders to the windows.
Sahana Begum, who lives a few streets away, rushed outside when she heard the crash.
"I saw someone yelling that a crane had fallen - then I could hear someone saying, 'Help, help, help'," she said.
"As she was coming down the ladder you could see that she was shivering.
"She was shivering so much that she could have fallen over because she looked like she was going to miss her step."
Daniel Duncan, a 43-year-old dry liner, said residents were "gutted" to hear a casualty remains trapped.
"As long as they're alright, it doesn't matter," he said.
And Rahana Rahman, 26, said she she's lucky to be alive after the crane smashed through the properties.
The property lawyer said: "Out of nowhere I heard big noise, big rubble, I thought it was an earthquake.
"The whole house shook so much and I can hear my mum just screaming because I was the only one upstairs.
"She thought that it had hit me.
"If I had been in the bathroom, the attic would have come down on me.
"It would have knocked me out.
""I can't believe the timing. I just had closed the door to my room and heard that.
"I literally can't believe it. I had literally had a narrow escape. We're so lucky."
Eye-witnesses at the scene told of how the crane collapsed on top of an apartment building currently under construction and then hit a row of terraced houses.
Neighbours reported hearing a loud crash followed by sirens as emergency services responded to the incident.
One witness, who did not want to be named, told The Sun Online: "It was a huge crash and everyone was running to their windows to see what had happened.
"Just a couple of minutes later the sirens started and there's been more and more police, fire, ambulances arriving since."
The four storey block of flats is currently under construction near a row of terraced homes.
The crane appears to have fallen on top of the flats before part of the structure hit the two houses around 30 feet away.
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Ambulance service officials tonight confirmed someone has died in the tragedyCredit: PA:Press Association
The 65-foot crane collapsed into the row of houses at around 2.30pmCredit: UK News in Pictures
One house could be seen with extensive damage to the roofCredit: Jamie Lorriman
Emergency crews are now working to free people trapped insideCredit: UK News in Pictures
The wreckage of the crane at the scene this afternoonCredit: Universal News & Sport (Europe)
A Met Police statement said: "At approximately 2.39pm police were called to Gale Street to a report of a crane that has collapsed into a residential property and a building site.
"Officers are on scene. We have received reports of four people suffering injuries at this time.
"Road closures are in place and police are assisting the local authority."
London Fire Brigade said it had received more than a dozen calls and crews are currently on the scene.
Assistant Commissioner Graham Ellis said: "A 20 metre crane has collapsed onto a block of flats under development and into two terraced houses on Compton Close.
"Our Urban Search and Rescue crews are undertaking a complex rescue operation and using specialist equipment to search the properties.
"There are reports of that least one person that may be missing and unaccounted for in the houses.
"The London Ambulance Service have confirmed that two people have been taken to hospital with head injuries and a further two were treated at the scene.
"This is a multi-agency response and is likely to be a protracted incident. I would ask people to avoid the area."
The crane that collapsed was being used by Swan Housing Association and NU living.
A spokeswoman for Swan Housing Association and NU living said: "Swan Housing Association/NU living is aware of an incident that occurred at our Watts Grove development site in Tower Hamlets, east London, this afternoon.
"A full incident response has been implemented and our staff are on site supporting the emergency services in their response."
Work on the Watts Grove site began in 2018 and the one, two and three-bed shared ownership apartments are replacing an electrical substation building, according to the NU living website.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted: "This is a tragedy.
"My heartfelt condolences go out to the family of the victim who died during this incident in Bow today. I sincerely hope that the four individuals injured make a full recovery."
Officials from Tower Hamlets Council have also this evening issued a statement, which reads: "We are incredibly shocked by the crane collapse this evening in Bow and our thoughts are with the families of those affected."
Unite national officer Jerry Swain said there must be "an urgent, full and complete investigation into the circumstances that led to this accident".
He added: "The preliminary findings of which must be released in weeks, rather than months or years, in order to ensure that similar accidents are avoided in the future."
Prior to confirming the death of the casualty, officials from the ambulance service said: "We were called at 2.42pm today to reports of an incident involving a crane collapsing near Watts Grove, Bow.
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“We dispatched a number of specialist resources including an advanced paramedic, ambulance crews and our hazardous area response team (HART), with the first of our medics arriving within three minutes.
“Currently our crews have treated four people at the scene. We treated two of these patients for head injuries and took them to hospital and we assessed the other two patients at the scene."
A 'complex' search and rescue mission is currently underwayCredit: AFP or licensors
Police and paramedics remain on the sceneCredit: AFP or licensors
Police, fire and paramedics are all at the sceneCredit: UK News in Pictures
Fire crews and paramedics were called to the scene at around 2pm todayCredit: bteirney/Twitter
A crane appeared to have collapsed on top of the building siteCredit: bteirney/Twitter
With the announcement of an additional £30bn, the total is nearly £3,000 for every person in the UK - and more than the entire planned health budget for 2020-21.
It means the cost of the crisis has risen by more than 40% since last month, when the government's spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, estimated it at £133bn.
This extra spending is likely to push the gap between what the government spends and what it raises in taxes - the deficit - above the OBR's latest estimate of around £300bn, according to the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank.
Before the coronavirus outbreak began, the government was expecting a deficit of £55bn.
'Skated over'
The extra public spending figure includes £15bn to buy personal protective equipment such as gloves and masks.
It also includes £10bn for the testing and tracing of infected persons, taking the total extra spending on health services to £32bn.
"There is a huge public services additional spending that we didn't really know about that was announced (on Wednesday). It was kind of skated over, but £15bn for PPE for frontline workers is an enormous sum," Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, told the BBC.
He said the chancellor's strategy is to spend money now, to minimise long-term damage to the economy, which would ultimately cause more harm overall.
"I don't think the chancellor is desperately worried about the size of the deficit this year. What will concern him is the size of the deficit the year after, and the year after, and the year after that," he said.
Politicians in Leicester said the local economy was facing severe damage, after the city was placed under the UK's first local lockdown, with no date announced for its reopening.
The city's mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, told the BBC he was "absolutely furious" that expected help had not materialised, describing the lack of support as "brutal".
Labour's shadow social care minister Liz Kendall, who is MP for Leicester West, said people in the city had made "huge sacrifices" and were "desperate".
"I know it costs money and we all have to pay for it somehow but it will cost even more money if we don't keep our businesses open and we don't keep people in jobs. So I think there's a moral issue here - if we are in lockdown for longer we need help for longer," she said.
There are some things no Chancellor can prepare for - such as what to do if your economy wipes out 18 years' gains in two months of lockdown.
His solution was to temporarily deep freeze the economy, and pump money into crisis response. And the thawing process needs more funds, to prevent long term damage.
Now economists are talking about a deficit, a shortfall of way more than the £300bn previously expected. It's equivalent to a bigger slice of the economy than at any time since the Second World War.
And it could get bigger; if more is needed to support the recovery - or in the event of a severe second wave.
But it's a cost worth bearing if it carries the economy through a devastating crisis, safeguard the damage to output and jobs - and ensure taxes get paid.
For at some point, there will have to be a discussion about how we pay this back.
The government is currently borrowing record amounts on the financial markets to plug the gap - but that may not be enough. There may have to be tax hikes, possibly less generous rises in pensions.
But it may be a while until the economy is robust enough to bear that.
In a letter released by Ms Kendall, Business Minister Nadim Zahawi said there were "no plans" to extend any of the support schemes such as furlough and claimed the city council had spent only £500,000 of a £3.5m discretionary grant it had received from government.
A government spokesperson said that "the circumstances of individual lockdowns will continue to be carefully assessed before appropriate action is taken".
Meanwhile, Airlines UK also criticised the decision not to extend the furlough scheme beyond October, saying flights were likely to continue to be restricted during the winter.
It would mean more jobs lost in addition to the tens of thousands of redundancies already announced "if the government continues to ignore aviation", a spokesman for the trade body said.
Other large expenditures during the coronavirus crisis include £4.7bn for local government, £5.3bn for public transport, and £4.1bn for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
However, the impact of the coronavirus on the public finances remains highly uncertain.
Of the policy measures announced in the summer statement, the biggest was the plan to pay employers £1,000 for every furloughed worker they retain past January. The total bill could rise as high as £9.4bn, but only if every furloughed worker keeps their job.
Rishi Sunak did not pull his punches when he laid out the scale of the task ahead as the government tries to steer the British economy off the rocks of a deep recession.
The chancellor pointed to the "profound economic challenges" we faced, citing the IMF's expectation that the world is heading for the worst global recession since records began, while our own economy had ground to a halt.
"In just two months our economy contracted by 25 per cent - the same amount it grew in the previous eighteen years."
Will the budget pay off?
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates there will be more than £130 billion of government support and additional public funding up until the end of October via the furlough scheme, more generous benefits, business grants, public spending, tax deferrals and loans; and then the chancellor unveiled another big stimulus package on Wednesday worth up to £30 billion more as he tried to create the conditions for a v-shaped economic recovery against the bleak backdrop of potentially millions of job losses and a slump in household consumption.
A chancellor who says he is approaching this crisis "unencumbered by dogma" and will continue in that spirit. "We will not be defined by this crisis, but by our response to it," he said.
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And to that end, the chancellor has been tasked with rehabilitating the Johnson administration, whose approval ratings have fallen over the handling of the crisis.
Within Number 10 there is a view that if the government can navigate the economic crisis better than the health crisis, it will be forgiven for some of the mistakes it made around care homes, protecting health workers, the timing of lockdown and the high death toll.
More from Coronavirus
It helps explain why Mr Sunak is a chancellor not so interested in economic ideology, but rather what he thinks might work.
You only have to look at the chancellor's version of Labour's 2009 Future Jobs Fund - the £2 billion put into a "kickstart scheme" to get young people into work placements - and the "jobs retention bonus" to see that he is prepared to continue pumping public money into the economy to try to protect jobs - and blunt Labour's attacks.
But of course Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak lead a party which is interested in ideology and cares deeply about maintaining traditional Tory values of low taxes, tight controls on borrowing and constrained public spending.
In the face of an acute economic crisis, MPs have let the leadership chart an interventionist path. But in the tea rooms I'm told there was one main subject of conversation amongst Conservative MPs. How on earth are we going to pay for it when the bill comes in?
Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis, the party has supported the unprecedented economic packages put in place in recent months, but there is growing disquiet about the levels of debt the Treasury is taking on, and growing demands for a fiscal framework to repay the eye watering levels of borrowing (set to rise to more than £350 billion this financial year).
Self-described "old Thatcherite" Sir Edward Leigh spoke for many of his colleagues when he argued in the commons "there are no good long-term subsidised jobs" and asked the chancellor to make sure "we have a plan to repay the national debt, otherwise as a previous speaker once said, there will be no more money".
Sajid Javid, the former chancellor, asked his successor to set out new fiscal rules in the Autumn with an aim of "getting our national debt down as a proportion of our national income by the end of this parliament".
Mr Sunak knows all too well how easy it is to spend the money and how hard it will be to pay it back.
'Furlough cannot continue indefinitely'
He is gambling with vast sums now in the hope that it will minimise the economic damage of the pandemic in the longer term.
But what he cannot know yet is whether this stimulus package will work.
When it comes to employment, Labour think the job retention money should be better targeted for sectors that really need support.
One Tory MP told me it was a bit of a "dead weight" scheme given that payments are mainly going to firms that would have been bringing back workers anyway. But as what it amounts to is cash grants for the hardest hit sectors, it at least buys Mr Sunak some time.
Dodds criticises 'one size fits all approach'
What the chancellor also cannot predict is how consumers will react. He tried to use his statement today to entice people back to our bars, restaurants, cafes and hotels by cutting VAT and even offering to pay for our meals for at least some of the week.
But how much people are prepared to do for the national recovery depends on the virus and whether it can be kept at bay, as the government tries to perform the difficult balancing act of managing the pandemic while re-opening the economy.
As Mr Sunak said himself, this government will be defined by how it responds to the crisis. But what makes that so hard is that when it comes to the virus, politicians are not in full control.
Rishi Sunak did not pull his punches when he laid out the scale of the task ahead as the government tries to steer the British economy off the rocks of a deep recession.
The chancellor pointed to the "profound economic challenges" we faced, citing the IMF's expectation that the world is heading for the worst global recession since records began, while our own economy had ground to a halt.
"In just two months our economy contracted by 25 per cent - the same amount it grew in the previous eighteen years."
Will the budget pay off?
Over £27 billion of government support and additional public funding committed since 11 March via the furlough scheme, more generous benefits, business grants, public spending, tax deferrals and loans; and then the chancellor unveiled another big stimulus package on Wednesday worth up to £30bn more as tried to create the conditions for a v-shaped economic recovery against the bleak backdrop of potentially millions of job losses and a slump in household consumption.
A chancellor who says he is approaching this crisis "unencumbered by dogma" and will continue in that spirit. "We will not be defined by this crisis, but our response to it," he said.
Advertisement
And to that end, the chancellor has been tasked with rehabilitating the Johnson administration, whose approval ratings have fallen over the handling of the crisis.
Within Number 10 there is a view that if the government can navigate the economic crisis better than the health crisis, it will be forgiven for some of the mistakes it made around care homes, protecting health workers, the timing of lockdown and the high death toll.
More from Coronavirus
It helps explain why Mr Sunak is a chancellor not so interested in economic ideology, but rather what he thinks might work.
You only have to look at the chancellor's version of Labour's 2009 Future Jobs Fund - the £2 billion into a "Kickstart Scheme" to get young people into work placements - and the "Jobs Retention Bonus" to see that he is prepared to continue pumping public money into the economy to try to protect jobs - and blunt Labour's attacks.
But of course Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak lead a party which is interested in ideology and cares deeply about maintaining traditional Tory values of low taxes, tight controls on borrowing and constrained public spending.
In the face of an acute economic crisis, MPs have let the leadership chart an interventionist path. But in the tea rooms I'm told there was one main subject of conversation amongst Conservative MPs: how on earth are we going to pay for it when the bill comes in?
Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis, the party has supported the unprecedented economic packages put in place in recent months, but there is growing disquiet about the levels of debt the Treasury is taking on, and growing demands for a fiscal framework to repay the eye watering levels of borrowing (set to rise to more than £350 billion this financial year).
Self-described "old Thatcherite" Sir Edward Leigh spoke for many of his colleagues when he argued in the commons "there are no good long-term subsidised jobs" and asked the chancellor to make sure "we have a plan to repay the national debt, otherwise as a previous speaker once said, there will be no more money".
Sajid Javid, the former chancellor, asked his successor to set out new fiscal rules in the Autumn with an aim of "getting out national debt down as a proportion of our national income by the end of this parliament."
Mr Sunak knows all too well how easy it is to spend the money and how hard it will be to pay it back.
'Furlough cannot continue indefinitely'
He is gambling with vast sums now in the hope that it will minimise the economic damage of the pandemic in the longer term.
But what he cannot know yet is whether this stimulus package will work.
When it comes to employment, Labour think the job retention money should be better targeted for sectors that really need support rather than with one Tory MP telling me it was a bit of a "dead weight" scheme given that payments are mainly going to firms that would have been bringing back workers anyway. What it amounts to is cash grants for the hardest hit sectors, and it at least buys Mr Sunak some time.
Dodds criticises 'one size fits all approach'
What the chancellor also cannot predict is how consumers will react. He tried to use his statement today to entice people back to our bars, restaurants, cafes and hotels by cutting VAT and even offering to pay for our meals for at least some of the week.
But how much people are prepared to do for the national recovery depends on the virus and whether it can be kept at bay, as the government tries to perform the difficult balancing act of managing the pandemic while re-opening the economy.
As Mr Sunak said himself, this government will be defined by how it responds responds to the crisis. But what makes that so hard is that when it comes to the virus, politicians are not in full control.
